Hunan Satellite TV is offering migrant workers and poor students in Beijing and Shenzhen 300 free plane tickets to Hunan so they can unite with their family for the Spring Festival, the Chinese Lunar New Year.

The TV station launched the Love Leads Home project to help students and migrant workers who have suffered the ill effects of Tropical Storm Bilis to return to their hometowns for the Spring Festival. The project was launched in conjunction with the Hunan Provincial Committee of the Communist Youth League of China and China Southern Airlines.

To enter the running for the free tickets, applicants can call the free hotline on 0731-4304681 or 0731-4417629. They can also download the form from the Sina web portal and post their story to xuezi@hunantv.com. Only 300 tickets are available and the competition closes on February 5.

Tropical Storm Bilis hit 33 counties and six cities in Hunan Province in July 2006. The rainstorms, flash floods, landslides and mudflows inflicted economic losses of 12.3 billion yuan and affected 7.29 million people.

With the help of the government, the people of Hunan have started reconstruction work in order to ease the economic burden on migrant workers from the province. As many as six million migrant workers come from Hunan. Some are working on projects related to the Beijing Olympics, some are constructing railways in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, others yet are working on construction projects in other parts of the country.
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(CRI January 26, 2007)